The trouble with borrowing ideas from outside your field of expertise

The reason I reblog this, is because it addresses one of the most difficult aspects of the science and religion field. As a theologian, it takes a lot of effort to make sure you understand what science is doing, before you can even start contemplating the theological implications of scientific theories. And, as mentioned in this blogpost: there is always the risk of getting it wrong. The strange part, however, is that this should also be a concern for scientists studying religion, but it actually often does not. On the contrary, theology is often depicted as irrelevant to evolutionary studies of religion or cognitive science of religion, because of its reflective nature, which is seen as merely a particular icing on the universal cake of human features. Although I can partly understand the reasoning behind this, I don’t agree with the conclusion. It seems to me that scientific studies of religion not only run the risk of propagating ‘evo-myths’ , as in the neuromyths in the original blogpost above, when they use concepts from cognitive science or evolutionary theory, but, moreover, they run the risk of propagating ‘reli-myths’, when they use religious concepts without really knowing what they mean. Or, put in other words, I question the implicit claim, made by scientific studies of religion, that science knows better than religious believers what religion is about.

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